Plans to curb power outages in Centurion

The Tshwane metro is to take measures to stabilise electricity supply for residents of greater Raslouw and areas in the west of Centurion.

This comes after the Centurion residents held a march in protest against the ongoing outages, Rekord Centurion reports.

Utility services MMC Abel Tau said that in 2018, the city had embarked on a programme to stabilise and improve electricity supply to the area.

“We wanted to do so firstly, by commissioning the new Peachtree sub-station, and carrying out several upgrades to the Raslouw sub-station (which currently stands at 80 percent completed),” he said.

Tau said another problem was that the cable network was connected to the overhead lines network “and overhead lines network is exposed to stormy weather and tree branches”.

“Unfortunately when a trip occurs on the overhead lines, the area outages increased exponentially,” he said.

The electricity department and Tau said the following steps would be taken to reduce the number of electricity outages:

· Introducing an on-line monitoring system at the Raslouw substation during the next financial year.

· Replace copper cables with aluminium cables.

· Switching the overhead cable network to the underground after the copper to aluminium replacement programme is completed.

. Repair and normalise the abnormal cable network.

· Intensifying the city’s tree pruning programme.